I believe that this is the nub of the problem here, in the UK it is fairly common for insurance companies to fit trackers that report on the driver's behaviour in return for substantial discounts on their premiums and I can also see governments applying this sort of technology to drivers who have multiple speeding convictions.

The total reliance on a service in the cloud will inevitably brick the whole vehicle should that service become unavailable.

There are lots and lots of talented musicians creating new music that is very, very good. I manage a small arts centre that hosts Americana, Bluegrass, and classic folk performers from across North America and the UK. Over the last 10 years they have all brought almost exclusively self-penned music and wile most has been very good some has been good enough to persuade me to buy a CD or vinyl Album with my own money.

However they all complain about fighting Spotify and AI Slop, touring and selling music direct is what allows them to work part or full time as musicians.

Cold Comfort Farm, Fahrenheit 451, 1984, and Matilda are not mainstream blockbusters but are none the less are books that I would recommend to anyone to improve their comprehension of written language and society as a whole.

JK Rowling's contribution to improving the reading skills of children across the planet is one of the greatest unintended consequences of our time.

Nope. Today you can use a drone to produce a 3D image of a site, add the hole or trench you want dug and the excavator will dig it out.

It even senses where the dump truck is and puts all the spoil into it. Yes the dump truck is also autonomous.

I spend some time in a UK academy a few years back as a favour for a headmaster. Each secondary school had their own IT system, each was unique, and every man and his dog had some form of admin rights with a VMWare cluster underneath a WinTel solution and Google classrooms in the cloud. Add in teachers sticking malware laden USB sticks into their desktops (essential teaching materials) and connecting personal laptops to the network.

They were paying just over minimum wage for someone to manage and maintain the whole thing and fair to say they had problems every other week.

Scotland have an issue with leaking pipes due to a lack of maintenance and upgrades but it is masked by the copious rainfall. It will eventually be a problem as the sink holes get bigger and bigger.

Clydesdale Bank, now Virgin Money, do this all the time, Utter, utter, wankers training their customers to give away their security to cold callers.

And yes they call from a withheld number and proceed to ask for all your security details. When you suggest that you will call back to the number on their website and can they have a reference they won't give a reference as you have not given the cold caller your details, If you can be bothered to call the numbers on their website some very exasperated call center minions apologise and commiserate.

When it is done properly with sanctions for clicking on the bait it works. I work on two systems with over 150K users on each, phishing training combined with link security works, It's not cheap, but it works.

Trying to learn Italian I thought I was doing OK and after some success in buying metro tickets in Rome persevered with Duolingo until it started asking me to translate "the elephant is coming to lunch".

That's plain weird.

Here in the UK there are several projects using radar and lasers to dissuade bats and birds from flying into the blade paths. It happens enough for the operators to fund the development and installation of the equipment.

Is this the same Amazon who's CEO has been partying the length of European fleshpots to excess for the last month? The one who Amazon has given more money than is decent - even Croesus would blush at the excess - suggesting that they are more than capable of hiring more warehouse workers rather than asking the office staff to roll up their sleeves.

This only works in the sort of organisations where the CEO leads by example and puts in the first shift themselves.

Currently instead of the sites that you are looking for Google serve up sites that want to sell you things that they think you might buy and those sites are selected by Google based on how much they are prepared to pay Google for being served up.

Google have killed the advertising market for local events, it's now almost impossible to effectively advertise a concert to a potential audience, and lots of publishers are going out of business.

In the UK we have had remote ATC running for the last four years.

You can read about it here: https://www.caa.co.uk/media/0c...

Pack in the 1980's and 1990's fourth generation languages (4GLs) were going to allow people to produce spiffing applications without the need for anyone who could actually code. The languages of the day, Algol, Cobol, and FORTRAN would be consigned the dustbin of history.

Access, Visual Basic, and Frameworks all made similar promises and now we have AI manifesting itself as the latest iteration of the Emperor's clothing.

Goats eat the plants right down to the roots and kill it - they are one of the reasons for deserts expanding in north Africa.

They will also wander about on top of the panels, eat through cables, and generally mess things about.